In case you wondered, Spanish tempranillos are an inexpensive and superb way to numb the nightly pain of not having College Gameday or a mid-week radio call-in show to soothe the ache of living. But we’ve decided that FoxSports College Football News site is at least as good as our fruity, underpriced Spanish darlings, with daily posts by crack writers who understand the keys to grinding out offseason writing are obsessive detail and abundant, sometimes groundless speculation. (We’ve got a little bit of a man-crush on Pete Fiutak, but we’re coping. Another glass of the Campos Reales, por favor…)
Check the coaches’ lists for the SEC for a taste of what I’m talking about. Savory, mindless, and everything you desperately need in the first full week of March.
Dreamboat/Coach Rick Neuheisel is now officially the luckiest man on the face of the earth, having settled with the University of Washington for 4.5 million dollars in his firing dispute. The most jarring facts of an already bizarre case are:
1. U. of Washington, which is run by Ph.Ds and defended by no-doubt pricey lawyers, fired Neuheisel not for his team’s underacheiving performance and his players habits of crashing frat house parties and punching local cops in the face, but for his March Madness office pool. Neuheisel, himself a member of two different bar associations, recognized what crap that is and sued the pants off the university. Point being: put enough people with Ph.Ds in a room with something explosive, and you will either come out with an atomic bomb, or be blown up in the process of making one. U-Dub got the second result, and it cost them the equivalent of a down payment on a Gulfstream private jet.
2. Neuheisel’s hair, though thinning, was cleared of any wrong doing and remains buoyant, well-conditioned, and optimistic for the future.
Young Rick: also the bassist for Loverboy?
3. If Ty Willingham gets another premature axe for being 7-5 and black, there’s no wayyyy the University will get away with it without a lawsuit. Which means Willingham gets at least four years, or the Huskies should just keep David Boies on retainer indefinitely. Oh, and having UW donor Bill Gates’ army of killer robots ready and waiting to crush a swarming bloodthirsty media wouldn’t hurt, either.
4. Neuheisel’s dreamboat life will continue uninterrupted. He’ll find the hundred dollar bill on the ground, get a free lap dance, win the lottery, and drive a car that’s both stylish, affordable, and sporty with hands at the ten and two positions. At night he’ll dry his tears of joy with his piles of excess cash while you watch basic cable and dread work the next day. What’s the point? He’s Rick Neuheisel, and you’re not. And don’t forget it.
Looks like the story continues to bleed out slowly, this time with CNNSI via the AP. We wonder: why the slow rollout of the numbers? And why the consistent mentions of Fresno State and Baylor and no mention of USC’s dismal numbers?
We’re guessing it has something to do with the Trojans’ position as defending national champion, or the sheer animal magnetism of all those dudes in skirts holding swords. We put more faith in the former theory, though stepping onto the USC campus with a formal notice of inquiry could be dangerous, you know-we remember what they did to Johnny Knoxville a few years ago.
What this cannot mean is that Fresno and Baylor are getting off light. They’re both relatively insignificant and would give Myles Brand the perfect opportunity to show his fangs without having to bite into a program that could bite back in the form of damaging the overall national reputation of the NCAA at all. (And don’t forget those jersey sales, either…)
Apparently everyone has replay fever now. The SEC is going to try it out a la the Big Ten, putting it on a trial basis for the 2005 season. Do you really want less error in the game? Do you really want to watch some Gomer stick his head under the hood of a replay machine for five minutes in the middle of a game? Do you finally want your team’s nutcrushing defeat to be entirely the fault of the team, and not easily blamed on the refs? We thought that constituted one of the great pleasures of the collegiate game: lack of culpability due to official incompetence. Oh, and one last thing, quoting from Maisel’s mailbag contributor Derrick Brown from lovely Pensacola, FL:
Had it been around in the SEC the last three years, Florida would have three or four more wins. Sounds good if you’re a Gator fan, until you realize Ron Zook would still be your coach. Say no to instant replay.
Masochistic? Yes we are. Cruel? No way. We concur, Derrick.
Culpability begins somewhere. Barnett to follow? Not likely. Run for your life, Kenny…(see prior Barnett post.)
How does a person get addicted? I just finished Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Dry, and the great mystery of the book is how someone goes from being a relatively normal human being to drinking two or three bottles of Dewars’ a day every day for years on end. Or, more relevantly to us, how does someone end up on the couch on a Thursday night watching Louisville(the official team of Thursday night) play Colorado State in an ineptly played 6-3 game that made us want to claw our eyeballs out?
In the book, you discover that not being really normal-his mother was diagnosed clinically insane, and he grew up in the house of their psychiatrist and his adopted son, who raped Burroughs mercilessly for much of his adolescence. So being extremely fucked up by life helps. So what’s our excuse for rampant drinking and excessive remembrance of useless college football trivia? Admittedly, most of the college football fans I know don’t have mad mothers, and if there’s any forced sodomy in their past, they certainly don’t share it with others.(Unless you ask nicely after a few drinks, of course.)
I think for some fans-Boston fans pre-2000s especially-the real dedication comes in a certain amount of masochism. Getting dumped might suck, but getting dumped by a really beautiful woman, one who set fire to your house, gave you gonorrhea, and then ran over your pet pig…now there’s something grand and awful about that. Kind of like Jean Claude Van Damme movies: so putrid, so unwatchable, so laughingly bad…that we actually love them, with the logical exception of Double Impact with Dennis Rodman.
I went back and tried to remember the moments that got me hooked. I was surprised to find that the losses were what really stuck out-always more vivid, and always the bait for a deeper level of addiction that came with the next one. Kind of like getting trashed, and going straight to morning beer to take the edge off the hangover. It’s a nasty cycle, and it all started with… (more…)
We here at EDSBS.com hold certain truths to be self-evident.
1. Solo cups contain beer, and beer only. Put gin in them and you will get what you deserve.
2. Women who clamor for male attention should always be ignored.
3. Never, ever trust a man wearing a sweater vest.
This naturally brings us to the topic of Jim Tressel, the Evil Sweater Vest patrolling the sidelines for Ohio State. Further proof that Ohio must be the single most concentrated puddle of absolute boredom in the universe, (more…)
The Attorney General for the entire state of Colorado says he’s willing to reopen the case against the CU football program if the grand jury report has anything new and substantial to say.
Does ’slush fund’ sound substantial to you? Is Gary Barnett buying green bananas at this point? Does anyone in Colorado know their head from their ass when it comes to institutional control?
Since our only experience with the social strata and dynamics of the population of Colorado comes from Columbine and intensive “South Park” watching, we assume no, and that this whole thing will end with Gary Barnett attempting to gun down Kathy Lee Gifford, missing, and shooting Kenny in the forehead.
YOU BASTARD!
Kenny and Friend, shortly before being gunned down by Gary Barnett
Stranko thinks we need to have some reason to post this, but we evidently need to review the posting rules with him at our next editorial meeting. We need no reason to post anything, especially something involving Fiddy Cent and firearms.
Some important questions here, though: Why is someone trying to shoot Fiddy? Don’t they know that bullets aren’t enough? He’s like Wolverine in the X-Men; you’ll have to pull the adamantium from his bones and lock him in a salt mine for a decade just to make him mad. That or force him to do a duet with Ja Rule; either way he’ll end up starving.
Also: why doesn’t this happen every week? I thought getting shot was a prerequisite for hanging out with Fiddy. This shouldn’t be news. Being a member of Fiddy’s entourage and getting shot is only news if they get shot multiple times in a single shooting. You’d also have to cut a couple of tracks before going to the ER just to keep up your rep.
Do we begin stacking the kindling for Gary Barnett’s funeral pyre at Colorado now? We thought a grand jury investigation was enough to make boosters nervous enough to boot Barnett, but evidently the brilliant strategy of “we will be exonerated” has now soured into “hide the hookers and the slush funds muy pronto.”(And haven’t we all had those weekends?)
The funniest thing about all of this is the central role Barnett has played in orchestrating this whole clusterfuck. Barnett is one of our nation’s certified “genius” coaches, which always makes us think less of Stephen Hawking and more of Wile E. Coyote sitting in front of a blueprint of a catapult and a rocket sled. He makes his own rules! He fake punts from his own ten! He outcoached Frank Solich…once or twice!
Gary Barnett, Super Genius
He also allegedly took funds from football camps and funneled it directly into slush funds that, according to the testimony, paid for hookers for CU football players and recruits. The dads who shelled out hundreds of dollars to send their middle schoolers were inadvertently funding Coach Gary’s Ho-Jo hoes for promising recruits.
Barnett’s playing it legalistic-like here, not saying shit about the allegations re: the prostitutes but claiming that the slush fund was justly culled from the entry fees paid by football camp entrants. Smart, but not exactly the exonerating, calming influence CU has to want from the head of its already wobbly football program tangled up in an increasingly embarrassing grand jury investigation.
On the upside, we now know the role women can play in the Colorado football program. Kicker? No. Playing naked center for a burly 18 year-old qb prospect from Steamboat Springs with no pants on at the Comfort Inn? Yes!
